Christina A. West:
The Body as Question
@cwestsculpture | www.cwestsculpture.com
Author: Anna Ponomarenko
Date: Apr 24, 2026
Curated Artist Spotlight
Christina A. West works with the human form the way a philosopher works with a problem – not to resolve it, but to keep it productively open. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, and currently an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, West has spent two decades building a sculptural practice that refuses the comfort of idealization.
Since 2019, her focus has shifted exclusively to the male body. The decision was deliberate and structural: the female nude saturates the history of art, and West was interested in what happens when the gaze is redirected. Her work does not mock or diminish. It does something more unsettling – it places the male body in the same position of scrutiny, vulnerability, and display that women’s bodies have occupied for centuries, and asks the viewer to sit with what that reveals.
The Work
West’s sculptures are built from glazed ceramic, cast silicone, lifecast plaster, and provisional lumber constructions – materials chosen for their tension between the permanent and the temporary. Her ceramic pedestals are fleshy, streaked with red and white, almost organic. When live models interact with them during exhibitions, the boundary between sculpture and performance dissolves. When the models leave, what remains are traces: plaster marked by contact, photographs of bodies that are no longer present, armatures that remember.
Her current installation ReVision (2026) continues this investigation – combining lifecast plaster, silicone, glazed ceramic, clamped plywood, and printed photographs into provisional structures that feel simultaneously archaeological and alive. The work asks how the body – present or absent – continues to shape what surrounds it.
Strut (2024), shown at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona and now part of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art 2025 Triennial, brought these questions into direct confrontation. A nude male model in his late forties posed on West’s ceramic structures on opening day – kneeling, sprawling, walking. Several visitors described feeling uncomfortable. West considers that a measure of success.
“I am a fan of awkwardness in my work,” she has said.
“The idealism that I’ve seen in historical representations of the body doesn’t feel real to me.”
Context and Career
West has exhibited widely across the United States, with solo and group presentations at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse), Atlanta Contemporary, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, among others. Her work is held in twelve permanent collections, including the Everson Museum, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Archie Bray Foundation, and the Virginia Groot Foundation.
Her practice is supported by an ongoing engagement with feminist theory and social criticism around the gaze – not as academic framework but as lived inquiry. The question her work keeps returning to is not what the body looks like, but what the act of looking does.
More information and documentation of West’s work is available at cwestsculpture.com